Then and Now, a Test That Aims to Neutralize Advantages of the Privileged

When the College Board announced Wednesday that it was overhauling the SAT in ways that would curb the advantages enjoyed by affluent students, it sounded a bit like the people who first designed and popularized the test decades ago.

The similarities end there. Across more than eight decades, the SAT’s backers have held it out as a yardstick, albeit an imperfect one, for academic merit, but notions of what defines merit have changed profoundly.

The test began in the 1920s supposedly as a gauge of intelligence, but in recent years has moved toward measuring whether high school students have learned what they should. The latest changes give the SAT a hard shove further in that direction, making it more like its competitor, the ACT, in redefining merit as less about cleverness, and more about curriculum mastery.

David Coleman, president of the College Board, says he wants to democratize higher education — lowering barriers to admission and helping more people go to college. That would not have sat well with the person most responsible for popularizing the SAT, James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard from 1933 to 1953.

Conant saw the test as a tool for identifying the most talented people outside Harvard’s usual pool of privileged applicants. He disliked previous assessments tied to the teaching of exclusive New England prep schools, said Nicholas Lemann, author of “The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy.”

“He specifically didn’t want a test of mastery of the high school curriculum — he wanted a test to tell you how smart the person was,” Mr. Lemann said. “He was haunted by the idea of a brilliant student ending up walking behind a mule and a plow because nobody knew how to find him.”

But the goal was not democratic. Conant’s aim was to identify a new elite based on brains rather than heredity, not to expand access to higher education.

In tune with the times, Mr. Coleman does want to improve access, in part by making a more level playing field. To counter test preparation courses taken by more affluent students, he announced a partnership with the online Khan Academy to make preparation videos available free. And he will make it easier for low-income students to take the test and apply to colleges without charge.

It has been understood for decades that people who grow up in families with wealth, education, access to good schools or all three have a leg up in testing, a fact that has often been used to attack claims about innate ability or merit. That will remain true, but supporters hope that planned changes in the test will reduce those advantages by tying the SAT more closely to the material that any college-bound senior should have learned in a common core curriculum across the nation.

“It elevates the importance of hard work on a day-to-day basis,” said William R. Fitzsimmons, the longtime dean of admissions at Harvard.

But Charles Murray, the libertarian author and American Enterprise Institute scholar, disagreed. He predicted that the changes “will not make any difference in the correlations between income and SAT scores,” in part because the most important academic advantage many wealthy families have is intelligence, not wealth.

Still, he agreed that “if they move toward something more like an achievement test, that’s good.” In fact, he advocates eliminating the SAT in favor of the SAT II tests, each based in a specific academic subject.

A team commissioned by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, and led by Mr. Fitzsimmons, reached similar conclusions. It reported in 2008 that curriculum-based tests send a message that working hard in high school, and not professional coaching, “is the way to do well on admission tests and succeed in a rigorous college curriculum,” and that more colleges should drop SAT and ACT requirements.

Admissions officers, even at the most competitive colleges, say that they care more about high school transcripts than standardized test scores, and studies show that transcripts are better predictors of college performance. Some, like Mr. Fitzsimmons, say that as a result, they never viewed the SAT as more than a blunt instrument.

But others insist that test scores can be important. And some fear that the new format could make it harder for the truly brilliant to stand out from the merely very bright.

“My first thought was it’s going to make it harder to distinguish anything based on this piece of data,” said Maria Laskaris, the dean of admissions at Dartmouth. “I’ll need to see a little more detail from the College Board to really understand how this will all play itself out.”

With grade inflation, enormous variation in high school rigor and a surplus of excellent applicants, she said, a test like the ACT or SAT “is, for the moment, the only thing that is standard across all our applicants.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: Then and Now, a Test That Aims to Neutralize Advantages of the Privileged. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe